Belinda (4 page)

Third ring, just as short and polite. Why wasn't Sheila cupping her hands around her mouth and screaming my name by now so that I could hear it all the way up here?

Then it occurred to me: Belinda, she'd gotten my address from my wallet. That's why it had been lying on top of my pants. I ran down the steps, both flights, and opened the front door, and she was just walking away, that same leather pouch hanging from her shoulder.

She had her hair up and her eyes were rimmed in kohl and her lips darkly red. If it hadn't been for the mail pouch bag, I wouldn't have immediately known her.

She looked even younger somehow-it was her long neck and her babycheeks. She looked so vulnerable.

"It's me, Belinda," she said. "Remember?"

I FIXED some canned soup for her and put a steak in the broiler. She was in a mess she said, somebody broke the padlock on the door of her room. She was afraid to sleep there tonight. It was scary somebody busting into her room, and it wasn't the first time it had happened. They'd taken her radio, which was the only damn thing worth taking. They almost stole her videotapes.

She ate the bread and butter with the soup as if she was starving. But she never stopped smoking or drinking the Scotch I'd poured for her. This time it was black cigarettes with gold bands on them. Sobranie Black Russians. And she was looking around all the time. She had loved the toys. Only hunger had got her to the kitchen.

"So where is this padlocked room?" I asked.

"In the Haight," she said. "You know, it's a big old flat, a place that could look like this if somebody wanted to save it. But it's just a place where kids rent rooms. Full of roaches. There's no hot water. I have the worst room because I came in last. We share the bath and the kitchen, but you'd have to be crazy to cook in there. I can get another padlock tomorrow."

"Why are you in a place like that?" I asked. "Where are your parents?" Under the light I could see the pink streaks in her hair. Her nails were done black. Black! And all that since this afternoon. One costume follows another.

"It's a hell of a lot cleaner than one of those skid row hotels," she said. She laid her spoon down properly, didn't drink the dregs in the bowl. The nails were long enough to look deadly. "I just need to stay here tonight. There's a hardware store up on Castro, where I can get the padlock."

"It's dangerous living in a place like that."

"You're telling me? I put the bars up on the window myself."

"You could get raped."

"Don't say it!" Visible shudder. Then her hand up demanding silence.

Was it panic behind the paint? Cloud of smoke from the cigarette. "Well, why the hell-"

"Look, don't lose any sleep over this, OK? I want to crash here for one night."

That clipped quality was almost gone. Pure California voice. She could have been from anywhere. But it still sounded like butter. "There's got to be someplace better than that."

"It's cheap. And it's my problem. Right?"

"Is it?"

She broke off another piece of French bread. The makeup job wasn't bad at all, just outrageous. And the soft black gabardine dress was vintage thrift shop. Either that or she got it from her grandmother. It fit snugly over her breasts and under her arms. A few sequins fallen off the tight neck band.

"Where are your parents?" I asked again. I turned the steak over.

She chewed the bread, swallowed it and her face set in a rather stern expression as she looked at me. The heavy mascara made her look even sterner.

"I'11 go if you don't want me here," she said. "I'11 understand perfectly."

"I do want you here," I said, "but I just want to know-"

"Then don't ask me about my parents." I didn't respond.

"I'11 leave if you mention that again." Very gentle. Very polite. "It's the easiest way you could get rid of me. No hard feelings. I will just go."

I took the steak out of the broiler and put it on the plate. I turned off the broiler.

"Are you going to mention it again?" she asked.

"No." I set the plate down for her with a knife and fork. "Want a glass of milk?"

She said no. Scotch was good enough, especially good Scotch. Unless of course I had bourbon.

"I have bourbon," I said in a small voice. This was criminal. I got down the bourbon and fixed her a weak drink. "That's enough water," she said.

In between rapid bites of the steak she was looking around the kitchen at the sketches I'd tacked up, the few dusty old dolls that had found their way to a shelf here. One early painting hung above the cabinets. It wasn't so good, but it was of the house where I grew up in New Orleans-my mother's house. She studied that. She looked at the old black wrought iron stove, the black-and-white tile.

"You have a dream house here, don't you?" she said. "And this is real good bourbon, too."

"You can sleep in a four-poster bed if you like. It has a canopy. It's very old. I brought it out here from New Orleans. I painted it in my Night Before Christmas."

She seemed immediately delighted.

"It's where you sleep?"

"No. I sleep in the back room with the door open to the deck. I like the night air. I use a pallet on the floor."

"I'll sleep where you want me to sleep," she said. She was eating incredibly fast. I leaned against the sink and watched her.

Her ankles were crossed and the straps of the little shoes looked very pretty going over her insteps. The napkin was a perfect white square on her lap. But her neck was the exquisite part. That and the gentle slope of her shoulders under the black gabardine.

She probably thought she looked grownup. But what the nail polish and the paint and cocktail clothes did, really, was turn her into kiddie porn.

I was thinking it over.

Seeing her got up like this, gulping bourbon and puffing that cigarette, was like watching little child star Tatum O'Neal smoke cigarettes in the movie Paper Moon. Children didn't have to be naked to look sexual. You could carnalize them by simply turning them out like adults, having them do adult things.

The problem with this theory was, she had looked just as sexy when I first saw her in the Catholic school uniform.

"Why don't you sleep with me in the four-poster?" she asked. Same simple and earnest voice she had used in the hotel suite.

I didn't say anything. I reached into the refrigerator and took out a beer and opened it. I took a long drink. There goes painting anymore tonight, I thought, rather stupidly since I knew I wasn't going to paint. But I could still photograph her.

"How have you managed to stay alive this long?" I asked. "Do you only pick up famous writers?"

She studied me for a long moment. She blotted her lips very fastidiously with the napkin. She made a little cast-off gesture with her right hand, ripple of slender fingers. "Don't worry about it."

"Somebody ought to worry about it," I said.

I sat down opposite her. She was almost finished with the steak. The paint on her eyes made it very dramatic when she looked down, then up. Head like a tulip.

"I have pretty good judgment," she said, carefully trimming the fat from the meat. "I have to. I mean I'm on the street, room or no room. I'm ... you know .... drifting."

"Doesn't sound like you like it."

"I don't," she said. Uneasy. "It's limbo. It's nothing-" She stopped. "It's a big waste of everything, drifting like this."

"So how do you actually make it? Where does the rent come from ?"

She didn't answer. She laid her fork and knife carefully across the empty plate and lighted another cigarette. She didn't do the matchbook trick. She used a small gold lighter. She sat back with one arm across her chest, the other raised, curved hand holding the cigarette between two fingers. Little lady with pink streaked hair, blood red mouth. But her face was absolutely opaque.

"If you need money, you can have it," I said. "You could have asked me this afternoon. I would have given it to you."

"And you think I live dangerously'." she said.

"Remember what I said about photographing you," I said. I took one of the cigarettes out of her pack. I used her lighter. "Strictly proper stuff. I'm not talking about nude shots. I'm talking about modeling for my books. I can pay you for that-"

She didn't answer. The stillness of her face was a little unnerving.

"I photograph little girls all the time that way for my work. They're always paid. They come from reputable agencies. I take pictures of them in old-fashioned clothes. And I work with these photographs when I make my paintings upstairs. A lot of artists work this way now. It doesn't exactly fit the romantic idea of the artist painting from scratch but the fact is artists have always-"

"I know all that," she said softly. "I've lived around artists all my life. Well, sort of artists. And, of course, you can photograph me and you can pay me what you pay the models. But that's not what I want from you."

"What do you want?"

"You. To make love to you, of course." I looked at her for a long moment. "Somebody's going to hurt you," I said.

"Not you," she said. "You're just what I always thought you'd be. Only you're better. You're actually crazier."

"I'm the dullest guy in the world," I said. "All I do is paint and write and collect junk."

She smiled, a very long smile this time. Bordering on an ironic laugh.

"All those pictures," she said, "of all those little girls wandering through dark mansions and overgrown gardens, all those secret doors-"

"You've been reading the critics. They love to go to town on a hairy-chested man who does books full of little girls."

"Do they talk about that, too? How sinister it all is, how erotic-"

"It's not erotic."

"Yes, it is," she said. "You know it is. When I was little, it used to put me in a spell to read your books. I felt like I was leaving the world."

"Good. What's erotic about that?"

"It's got to be erotic. Sometimes I didn't even want to start, you know-didn't want to slip into Charlotte's house. It would give me these funny feelings just looking at Charlotte creeping up the stairs in that nightgown with the candle in her hand."

"It's not erotic."

"Then what's the threat? What's behind all the doors? Why are the girls always looking out of the corner of their eyes?"

"I'm not the one chasing them," I said. "I don't want to lift their long dresses."

"You don't?" she asked. "How come?"

"I hate this," I said gently. "I work six months on a book. I live in it, dream in it. I don't question it. I spend twelve hours a day going over and over the canvases. Then somebody wants to explain it all in five hundred words or five minutes." I reached out and took her hand. "I avoid this kind of discussion with people I don't know. People I do know never do it to me."

"I wish you'd fall in love with me," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you're really someone worth falling in love with. And if we were in love, I wouldn't be drifting. I wouldn't be nobody. At least not while I was with you." Pause.

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

No answer.

"I keep trying to place your voice."

"You'll never do it."

"One moment it's just California. Then something else creeps in-a trace of an accent."

"You'll never guess it."

She withdrew her hand.

"You want me to sleep in the four-poster with you?" I asked.

"Yes." She nodded.

"Then do something for me."

"What?"

"Wash off all this glamour," I said. "And put on Charlotte's nightgown."

"Charlotte's nightgown? You have that here?"

I nodded. "Several upstairs. White flannel. One of them is bound to fit you."

She laughed softly, delightedly. But there was more to it than delight. I was silent. I wasn't admitting anything.

"Of course," she said finally. "I'd love to wear Charlotte's nightgown." So gracious. Flash of black fingernails as gracefully she ground out the cigarette.

No wonder she had thought that the matchbook trick was such a comedy. She was old, polished and suave, and even a little angry. Then she was young and tender. She was shifting back and forth before my very eyes.

And it was very disturbing to me. I wondered: Which did she want to be? "You're beautiful," I said.

"You think so?" she asked. "You wouldn't prefer a darker, more mysterious older woman?"

I smiled. "Been married to two of them. It was interesting. But you're something else."

"In other words, you want me to know it's not always little girls."

"Yes, I want you to know that. I want to remind myself too. But I can't figure you out. You've got to give me a clue on where you came from. A clue on the voice."

"I grew up everywhere and nowhere. Madrid, LA, Paris, London, Dallas, Rome, you name it. That's why you'll never pin down the voice."

"Sounds marvelous," I said.

"You think so?" Little twist to her smile. "Someday I'll have to tell you the whole ugly story. And you think Bettina has it bad in that old house."

"Why not start telling me now?"

"'Cause it won't make a pretty picture book," she said. She was getting uneasy. She blotted her lips again carefully and put the napkin back in her lap. She drank the last of the bourbon. This girl definitely knew how to put it down.

Ears with the tiniest lobes. Pierced lobes, but no earrings. just the hurtful little mark. And the skin very tight around her eyes so that there was only a tiny seam running around the lashes. This is the kind of tightness you see in the face of very little children. It usually goes away in the teenage years as the face becomes more modeled. The eyebrows were soft, unshaped, just brushed lightly with gray to darken them. In spite of the paint, her face still looked virginal, the way only a blond face can. And the nose was most decidedly upturned. She would most certainly hate it when she really grew up. But I would love it forever, and the poochy, delicious, puckered little mouth with it. I wanted to touch the loose hair that made fine question-mark curls near her ears.

"Where are your parents? You do have them, don't you?"